Monthly Archives: January 2005

Howard Dean looks like the probable selection for Democratic National Committee chairman. Donald Lambro of the Washington Times thinks that the selection of such a fire-brand leftist will likely hurt the party. Robert Novak and Dick Morris agree. Even leftist Harold Meyerson thinks that Dean “shlepps too much baggage” but adds that it normally doesn’t matter who the party chairman is. (Old-timers like my conservative cousin will enjoy the quiz »

The American Enterprise magazine is one of our favorites; under Karl Zinsmeister, it has become a premier public policy publication. So we were happy when Karl asked us to contribute an article to the magazine’s current issue, which focuses on the Ownership Society. The March issue is now available, and our contribution, “Broad Ownership Needs Broad Taxpaying,” is here. The thesis of the article is that, while giving Americans ownership »

For the fifth time in the last six months, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and its columnists defamed us today. The miscreant this time was one “Camille J. Gage,” who was a student in a class at the University of Minnesota that I gave a guest lecture to last fall. The piece accuses us of a failure to fact-check. The author refers to a news story we linked to last October »

Suzanne Fields in the Washington Times discusses the reinvention of Hillary Clinton. I haven’t had much to say about Hillary’s latest act of reinvention — her expression of “respect” for people who oppose abortion under all circumstances — because it struck me as inconsequential. Given her opposition, for example, to the ban on partial birth abortion, it’s difficult to see how Ms. Clinton is going to score any points by »

If you have a kid who has taken American history in high school, you know that a book answering to the description of A Patriot’s History of the United States is badly needed. I can’t vouch for the one coauthored by Professor Larry Schwekart that has just been published, but Frontpage carries an interesting interview with him this morning. The recently published Politically Incorrect Guide to American History appears to »

The New York Post carries two excellent columns that consider yesterday’s historic election in Iraq, one by Deborah Orin on the courage of the Iraqis who voted, and one by John Podhoretz on the Democratic reaction. »

Jonathan Last is the online editor of the Weekly Standard and has invited the three of us to submit columns on a rotating basis to The Daily Standard, the Standard’s online site. The Standard has posted my column on the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State last week: “Birmingham’s new legacy.” Please check it out. »

Yesterday, I speculated about the future of Europe in a post called “Can Europe Turn the Corner?” In doing so, I referred to a piece in the February issue of Commentary (not yet available online) by Arthur Waldron. The portions of Waldron’s piece on which I relied dealt with the economic situation in Europe. But Waldron also suggested that Europe seemed to be turning the corner in its attitude towards »

In Minnesota we’ve had the opportunity to get to know Senator Mark Dayton up close and personal. In mid-2003 we took a look at the theological musings set forth in the senator’s homily (“If we’re so right, why are there so few of us left?”) at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Minneapolis. The text Senator Dayton chose for his homily was, somewhat surprisingly given the occasion and the »

A reader pointed out this thread at Democratic Underground, where the innermost core of the Democratic Party is on display. Some of the posters, like the one who started the thread, are over the top: All the media keeps talking about is how happy the Iraqis are, how high turnout was, and how “freedom” has spread to Iraq. I had to turn off CNN because they kept focusing on the »

We knew that, of course. But it’s heartening to see the New York Times report that “Voting, Not Violence, Is the Big Story on Arab TV”: Sometime after the first insurgent attack in Iraq this morning, news directors at Arab satellite channels and newspaper editors found themselves facing an altogether new decision: should they report on the violence, or continue to cover the elections themselves? After close to two years »

Austin Bay alerts us to the second biggest story of the day: the upcoming May reunion of the short-lived sixties supergroup Cream at the Royal Albert Hall in May. Austin’s post is “CREAM dream reunion.” Cream is most famous for its role in launching Eric Clapton to rock stardom, but in the linked post Austin accurately describes the band’s achievement. »

Intending to live blog the first few hours of the Iraqi election, I was actually sleeping in front of the television when Geraldo Rivera roused me at around 1:00 a.m., stating in effect that I was missing the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall and the entire civil rights voting rights movement. Thus spurred, I quickly began blogging, starting with this post. Geraldo’s adrenaline kept me going for »

The process by which we succeed in Iraq (if we do) can be thought of as a series of events by which one party keeps faith with the others. First, we kept faith with the people of Iraq by remaining in force to rebuild the country after we toppled Saddam and carried out our search for WMD. Then, the Shiite majority kept faith by rejecting the radical elements when they »

Click here for the brief statement President Bush has made on the election today in Iraq. HINDROCKET adds: Ted Kennedy issued a statement today, too. The election was a disaster for Kennedy and his fellow defeatists, so Kennedy says that President Bush “must look beyond the election.” Yes, the sooner everyone forgets the triumph that today’s election repressents, the better! The complete text of Kennedy’s statement doesn’t seem to be »